Visions of Isabelle (6 page)

While they waited for lunch he showed her his library which was filled with religious and poetic texts. The books were in all languages, but the ones that fascinated her were written in Arabic, a language which interested her enormously and in which she was quite well-versed. She had read the Koran with Trophimovsky, because, Vava had explained, despite its "superstitious nonsense," it was a great work of literature which every educated person should know. Rehid Bey owned a large collection of ancient Korans, some of them enclosed in leather boxes and locked by jeweled clasps. He took one of these out, and they sat side by side to study the elegance of the Arabic script.

Isabelle became so enraptured by the interweaving of the border designs that she tried to trace a line around a page but soon became hopelessly lost. Rehid Bey then placed his index finger back at the beginning of the design, placed the same finger of her hand on top of his own, told her to ride him "piggyback," and carried her through the border without a fault. She was delighted, suggested they do it again. He turned the page, and this time her little finger rode his thumb. They were so amused that they did it on the next page, and on the next, until they drew so close on the velvet divan that Rehid Bey had no choice but to pull his head around and press down his lips.

The kiss was long. Their fingers slid off the book and began to interlace. The precious Koran started to slide to the floor, and would have landed there if the Turkish servant hadn't accidentally jarred one of the crystal glasses with a fork. At the sound they both snapped around and Isabelle caught the book just in time.

As soon as lunch was finished (partridge "en chartreuse," floating island), their embraces began again. And again they used their fingers to trace, but this time upon each other's flesh. An hour went by (though both, by then, had lost all track of time), and Isabelle, heated by his tender kisses and tickling fingers and strong arms and flattering words, found herself slipping into a novel mood. A sweetness filled her that she had not known before. She felt suffused by a blush, a glow, and felt that for the first time in her life she was being tended with the care that old Vava only lavished on his fondest plants. It was the "brown-eyed Levantine's" attentiveness that made her feel this way. It was as if each and every one of his caresses was a delicate stroke of a master painter's brush–a lick here, a lick there, until she felt like an image on a canvas glowing with life.

There came a time after they had thoroughly embraced that Rehid Bey led her to the balcony above his drawing room nave and there to a great four-poster canopied in paisley silk. Here, dazed and flushed, she opened herself to him, ready to endure what she guessed would be nearly unendurable pain.

Ah, such pain!
No drill puncturing brass, no searing rivet probing into steel, no immovable object attacked by an irresistible force–none of these images suited the case. She felt neither the sting of the bee nor the sharp pain of vodka poured over a gushing wound. It was not like a spark in the eye, a splinter in the knee, or a piece of flesh opened by a gnawing rake. But what was it like? At the very moment it was happening to her, she was struggling to define its nature. More like a filling of soft rich cream. More like a swallow of chocolate soufflé. It was as if she had a tongue down there and was licking at something with a sublime soft taste. This food (or whatever it was) was so delicious, in fact, that she lost completely her self-control. So good it was that it inspired an unquenchable hunger, and she was forced to eat at a faster and faster rate so that all that was offered she could more rapidly devour. This desire to pin down the essence of the event was soon abandoned, obliterated by the joys of the experience itself. She gave way to it entirely, lost all sense of what was going on, until she woke herself out of the whole frenetic dream by a cry that flew in soft whisper from her lips.

"Archivir," she said, and without knowing quite what she meant by it, or by what process the word had come into her mind, repeated it several times, trying it out with various mellifluous intonations until she achieved a pronunciation combined with an affectionate gasp. It was, she decided later, a splendid word that had been locked for many years inside her heart. Finally she had found something that deserved its caress. And that was how she happened to give it as nickname to Rehid Bey, whom she never called again by his Byzantine name, and, only rarely, by that phrase she'd coined for him the first time they met. Forever after he would be "Archivir" to her, and only on occasion "the brown-eyed Levantine."

In the middle of the afternoon Rehid Bey escorted Isabelle down the stairs. He asked her to wait in the lobby a few moments while he picked up his jacket and coat inside.

"I'm going out," she heard him say to the secretary.

"But the consul wants you to finish those reports before he returns from Bern."

There was a silence and then she heard Archivir's reply. "Let the consul be hanged."

He took her to a little photographer's shop around the corner from the Cathedral St. Pierre. The photographer, a stubby little man who sucked on the stump of a cigar, greeted him like an old friend. He ushered them into a back room where a wall was painted neutral gray. Facing it, mounted on a stand, was a Beaulieu camera, mahogany with fittings of brass and a magnificent set of bellows that reminded Isabelle of the ruffled collar of a clown. Archivir flung himself upon a sofa, lit a cigarette and peered about.

"Jacques," he said, "we must dress this young lady up. What do you suggest?"

"A sailor suit?"

"A little young don't you think?"

"It's really quite splendid–the latest thing from Britain."

"Well, give it to her then, and after that we'll try something else."

Isabelle was shown to a dressing room that smelled of camphor. A huge variety of costumes were displayed on hooks. Obediently she put on the sailor suit, and when she reappeared in the studio, Archivir gasped.

"Marvelous! I love the name on the hat–'Vengeance.'
 
Jacques, take her just like that. And be sure to catch the confused expression–she's just been pressed into service, and though she doesn't know it yet, she's going to have a great career."

Isabelle was shown to a decaying cane chair, seated there by Jacques who disappeared behind the camera and then came out again to adjust the angle of her head.

"Now you must sit very steadily," he urged her. "Frown a little–I think that's what Monsieur wants. Your ship, you know, is called
Vengeance,
a powerful British man-of-war. There's no fooling aboard her. The English flog disobedient sailors. That's right–hold it–don't blink–" and he lit the powder that ignited in a flash.

After appearing as a sailor she was photographed as other things: a Syrian banker, a Turkish gallant, a Bedouin warrior, a Spahi sergeant. The session took up the entire afternoon. Jacques and Archivir coaxed and admired, and by the end she was posing like a professional, assuming studied stances, glaring with Tartar eyes.

Finally, when she grew impatient with all this changing in and out of clothes, she cut the whole thing short with a flamboyant challenge, a race on skates with Archivir, twenty-five times around the rink on the lake.

He won the race, but not by much. Afterward they went back to his apartment, and again made love in the balcony above the nave. She did not return until late to Villa Neuve, and when she did no one asked her where she'd been.

O
ver the next weeks she met Archivir every day for lunch, and after each repast (each more elegant than the one before–lamb in pastry crust with
pommes dauphines
; duck breast filets with green apple puree), they indulged in new ecstasies upon the four-posted bed. Never in her life, she thought, had she learned so much so fast, not even during the most oppressive years of Vava's tutoring when it seemed he wanted to convey to her everything he knew.

Archivir, she discovered, had studied in Paris, was extremely well-educated and cultured in the literature of half a dozen lands. A lover of poetry, he could quote her vast texts by the hour, including most of the great speeches from Shakespeare's plays. He was extremely tough on her favorite Russian authors, especially on N
á
dson whom Isabelle adored. "He's smooth and lifeless," Archivir said, and when she mentioned the name of Pierre Loti he launched into a diatribe of scorn. Isabelle and Augustin had read Loti over and over. From him they had acquired a longing to visit the Middle East and an attitude of romantic gloom haunted by premonitions of death. Archivir would have none of this. He called Loti a dreamer and a fake whose romanticization of the lives of simple people was erroneous and in poor taste. "I could hardly believe it," he told her, "when he was elected to the Academie Française. But that particular body has always been a haven for overrated fools."

She listened to him with great attention, and occasionally argued back. But usually he overwhelmed her with his superior knowledge, and since he was teaching her so much about the requitals of the flesh, she was attentive to his views on everything else. Sometimes he surprised her by flinging himself down, after one or another of their bouts in bed, and stammering melancholy oaths at the uselessness of everything except the satiation of all physical desire.

"Divine food, great wine, expert love–they are the only important things in life," he said after a particularly violent session during which he taught her the sweet pleasures of the giving and taking of moderate pain. "I wish I could feel–only feel. I despise my education. I hate the curse of being intellectual, the need to impose words upon experience. If I could only just feel–FEEL!" And at that he beat with his fists upon the linen while Isabelle watched him, puffing on a gold-tipped Turkish cigarette.

His moods were unpredictable–he could slip from joy and laughter into long morose silences and then back again in a few moments time. When he felt like spending money, he would take her to the finest shops, order her custom-made pantaloons and capes of Melton wool. He never bought her dresses–he said she was too unique for clothes like that, and since she'd never worn women's clothes in her life, nor anything that was not a hand-me-down from her brothers, she did not protest. Archivir had a special fondness for leather of all types, suede vests, alligator belts, calfskin wallets, boots made in Morocco whose softness, he assured her, was attributable to the leather having been chewed in its makers' mouths. Once when making love he had covered both their heads with a tent of leather things. Then they breathed in the warm smells which he promised would increase his potency and her desire. She was fascinated by such bizarre escapades, believed he was teaching her the refinements of life.

There were times, too, when Archivir had no desire to leave his flat. Reluctantly he would go down the stairs to work, but when he felt so withdrawn, he would not go outside. Then she would wait for him in the nave, reading books about Turkey, Persia, Arabia and Egypt, all the countries of the Levant and the Maghreb. She longed, she told him, to visit these places, but he told her that in his opinion she was less interested in where she went than in leaving the place she lived.

"You're going to tell me that the things I want to escape will follow me wherever I go?"

"That may be true," he replied, "but then it's interesting you have no desire to go to Russia. Not like Nicolas–that's his dream. You're interested in the warm countries. You're a sensualist and the gray northern cities, the lands that are cold, repress your nature. Isabelle–you need warmth, a lush place where you can grow."

He was both extravagant and parsimonious, funny and melancholy, sensual and intellectual, European and Asiatic. She had never met a person so complicated, so mercurial. And yet she recognized that his overriding trait, the arch that covered all his facets and moods, was his insatiable hunger for new experiences, his desire to perfect his spirit by becoming a sensual connoisseur. They tried everything together, every sexual position he knew, and, when he ran out of these, new ones he uncovered in ancient manuals of love. Each time they ate, they sampled different foods. A Chinese restaurant hidden away down an alley off the Quai du Mont Blanc provided them with strange and remarkable dishes, gelatinous soups, exotic sauces, fishes prepared in spices they had never tasted before. He had joined the diplomatic service, he told her, so that he could spend his life traveling the world. He wanted to taste women of every race. He spoke of sleeping with one-legged dwarfs, and a cross-eyed whore whose eyes uncrossed when she was satisfied.

He believed in anal intercourse and practiced it upon her, urging her not to restrain her tears. Later, when she was still quivering from the pain, he assured her that by yielding to him that way she had given him proof of her submission. That night he bought some opium from an Indochinese in a café, and they smoked it together in ivory pipes, and again, the following night, through a Turkish hookah.

Through March and into April their passion raged. She defied Trophimovsky's anger and spent whole nights away from home. Her brothers knew what she was doing, but when they pressed her for details she refused to talk.

"Unless you tell me what you've been up to in town, I won't tell you a thing," she said to Augustin. He grinned at her shrewdness and bowed his head to show his esteem. Each morning she looked at herself in the mirror. She found it remarkable that she was so intensely desired, and searched her face for some clue as to why this was so.